Cover Story
and towards his high goals! “To play a third-place match without
losing (in classical chess) all tournament is not a great feeling,” Hess said. He acquitted himself with class throughout the tournament—Hess was one of the few players to enter the press room after a loss, and he also graciously offered a draw to IM Irina Krush in the blitz tour- nament when she stumbled trying to place a piece and was reduced to only a few seconds on her clock. Hess finished the championship in fourth place after drawing two games to Shankland. In their Armageddon match, Hess outbid Shank- land by five seconds to get black (20 minutes versus 19 minutes, 55 seconds) but lost the game itself. The finals were set. Shulman and Kam-
sky would reprise their ending to last year’s championship. However, this time around, an Armageddon match would only be needed if their two-game classi- cal bouts finished 1-1. Kamsky got his typical minute edge as
White in game one. With Shulman hold- ing the fort, he needlessly decided to open some kingside files and he lost his first game in the last two years in St. Louis. “Taking on g4 is horrible,” Kamsky said. “I think he just hallucinated. He helped me a lot—self-destruction. “My goal was to get to some simple
position with a little bit of pressure,” Kamsky said about his previous win over Shankland, but he might as well have been describing the wins over Shulman or Naroditsky, his three most important victories of the tournament. The largely auto-didactic Kamsky
Four-time U.S. Champion GM Yasser Seirawan proves himself a heart ‘krusher’ as he dances with three-time U.S. Women’s Champion IM Irina Krush at the closing ceremony.
It is amazing, but it seems that the
best chance to complicate the game was 30. ... Bf2!? 31. Rxf2 Nd3 32. Rff1 Nxe1 and White needs to find the convincing 33. Nfe5 to remove any remaining ques- tions about the final result.
31. Re2 e3 32. g5!
Yet another move order to weave a mat- ing net was 32. Nh6+.
32. ... Kh7 33. Nh6 Threatening the impressive Rf7 mate!
26 Chess Life — July 2011
33. ... Rg8 34. Nxg8 Kxg8 35. Ne7+ Kh8 36. Rh2, Black resigned.
Robert congratulated me for this victory
and the match win. My newborn son Gabriel, who turned just one day old dur- ing this game, brought his father luck in the form of my ability to deliver an excit- ing attack in such an important tournament moment! I call attention to the fact that Robert’s excellent perform- ance was absolutely deserved due to his hard work and constant striving to improve. I wish him further advancement
described his style at length: “Some may call it dry. There are two types of players —those that are aggressive and try to kill their opponent, like Garry (Kasparov), like Hikaru (Nakamura). And there are people who simply enjoy chess and look at it like art, which is me. In the simple positions, each piece has its own play. It's like an orchestra—everyone has his own line, he can shine. In the endgame, every piece is part of the whole and gets a chance to be its maximum efficiency. Recently somebody posted on my Face- book page this short cut from Amadeus. It was magnificent. The segment was about creating this masterpiece, and the guy was like, ‘OK, we’re going to bring in this sound, and then this sound.’ That’s exactly what playing chess is about. It’s a sequence and then you have overlap- ping motives. And I think it’s actually really beautiful.” Their second game was anticlimac-
tic. Kamsky played the Slav with ... a6, a line he used last year to beat GM Levon Aronian. Shulman said he pre- pared to push e2-e3. “I don’t know I played e2-e4,” he said, explaining he
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